Vancomycin is a powerful antibiotic against gram positive bacteria. Often it is used as a last resort, when no other antibiotic is expected to work, such as with Staphylococcal infections. However, more and more bacterial strains are developing resistance to this antimicrobial compound. Vancomycin-resistant microorganisms accomplish this by altering their cell wall structure, thus eliminating vancomycin's ability to bind to cells and disrupt its cell wall construction.

Scientists from the Scripps Institute report of devising a method to circumvent this.

Our successful synthesis of a novel vancomycin analogue with a molecular structure that restores much of the drug's binding ability could potentially lead to the development of a new generation of antibiotics that could prove far more effective against vancomycin-resistant infections than what is available today."

In a study that was published in the Journal of the american chemical society, the scientists engineered two vancomycin analogs, both of which showed to have an increased binding ability, and are estimated to be about 40% more potent than the current version of the antibiotic.

Read more from: The Scripps Research Institute.A dissertation entitled, The structural characterization of vancomycin analogue binding sites in Staphylococcus aureus (2005) is available for download via Amazon.

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